How Can Kilometre-Scale Models Change What We Know About the Ocean?

Thomas Rackow · portrait · 1:24

Resources

Video ID

thomas-rackow

Video

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/thomas-rackow/video.mp4

Poster

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/thomas-rackow/poster.jpg

Subtitles · English

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/thomas-rackow/en.vtt

Document

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  "content": {
    "title": "How Can Kilometre-Scale Models Change What We Know About the Ocean?",
    "author": "Thomas Rackow",
    "description": "In this publication, Thomas Rackow explains why the next generation of climate models resolves the ocean at kilometre scale. Eddies, the swirling storms of the sea, transport heat and carbon in ways coarse models can only approximate. Rackow shows how storm-resolving simulations turn these blurry statistics into visible physics, and what that sharpness means for projections of sea level and regional climate.",
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    "chapters": [
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        "name": "About",
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            "start": 7.12,
            "text": "My name is Thomas Rackow and I am a research scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts."
          },
          {
            "start": 12.06,
            "text": "My role is to look at mesoscale ocean features, so ocean eddies, and how they impact projections of future climate."
          },
          {
            "start": 25.42,
            "text": "My background is in applied mathematics and physics and in my postdoc I have worked on coupled climate modeling."
          },
          {
            "start": 32.42,
            "text": "My role in nextGEMS is to set up the integrated forecasting system that is coupled to the FESOM ocean model and actually run the simulations but also provide the data to all the participants here at the hackathons."
          },
          {
            "start": 49.58,
            "text": "My main research question is whether the high-resolution models that we are running in nextGEMS do something significantly different to state-of-the-art coarse-resolution models."
          },
          {
            "start": 65.04,
            "text": "So in particular I am interested to show that mesoscale ocean eddies impact the projections of future climate in a certain way and I think we will find out here during nextGEMS in what way this is."
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        "keyTakeaway": "Resolving ocean eddies directly, instead of approximating them, changes regional climate projections.",
        "summary": "Classic climate models treat ocean eddies statistically because their grids are too coarse to see them. Kilometre-scale simulations resolve the eddies themselves, and with them the heat and carbon highways of the ocean. The result is regional projections, of sea level in particular, that behave differently from what the approximations predicted."
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        "items": [
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            "label": "Ocean eddies",
            "description": "Swirling currents tens of kilometres wide that move heat and carbon around the ocean, invisible to coarse model grids.",
            "start": 0
          },
          {
            "label": "Kilometre-scale modelling",
            "description": "Climate simulations with grid cells small enough to resolve storms and eddies as physics rather than statistics.",
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          {
            "label": "Parameterisation",
            "description": "The art of approximating unresolved processes; powerful, but a persistent source of projection uncertainty.",
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            "title": "Climate modelling",
            "description": "Building numerical replicas of the Earth system to project how climate responds to forcing."
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          {
            "title": "Physical oceanography",
            "description": "The study of ocean circulation and its role in storing and moving heat and carbon."
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      "underlyingPublication": {
        "items": [
          {
            "title": "Eddy-resolving ocean simulations and regional sea-level projections",
            "authors": ["Thomas Rackow"],
            "journal": "Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems",
            "abstract": "Kilometre-scale ocean simulations resolve mesoscale eddies explicitly and alter regional sea-level projections relative to parameterised models.",
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